It’s a relatively short piece and doesn’t take that long to read through
An excerpt
At the time that I discovered Battlestar, I had been seeing news accounts of torture being used on people imprisoned at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. I could not understand how these kinds of things were allowed to happen or why other hit TV shows of the era, like 24 and Lost, seemed to sanction them. Even the brilliant programs that did engage with how 9/11 changed America—The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Shield—never really challenged the country’s actions. Battlestar did. As one scholar put it, the show asks the audience uncomfortable questions like, “What does it mean to be a human? What does it mean for a society to believe it is at war? Is it possible to be moral during times of profound crisis?”
I like how BSG (the new one — I’ve never seen the 1970s one) makes you question whether it’s okay to torture a Cylon. IIRC they all thought they were humans, too. Except maybe that one Six who was just straight up evil, but the other Six who was tortured on that other battlestar they encounter (I can’t remember its name), I seem to remember she thought she was human, and (at least at first) didn’t realise why the crew were treating her the way they were.
By the same token, is it okay to abuse or mistreat video game characters? What about AIs? I’m not a big fan of them, but ever since Siri gained the ability to follow up (i.e. it listens after answering), I just started thanking it. Not because “when the robots take over, they’ll spare the kind ones” but just because… that’s how I was raised. So I do get that it’s a bit silly to thank a computer for doing its job, but also, if we’re going to train them to act human, maybe we should teach by example as well?
I may be a basic bitch who needs to take a philosophy class, but i feel like it’s a good exploration of some aspects of humanity.
The 1970s one… couldn’t get into it.
The '70s one was done in an era where there were still significant controls on what was considered “acceptable” to be broadcast over the air for anybody to see. Even the “edgy” shows had to be reasonably family friendly. They did try to touch on some highly philosophical issues, but were too limited in what they were allowed to do to get very deep with them.
Are they really using your interactions as additional training material, tho? Or is it just able to reference prior conversation for additional context? Doing the former would seem to leave it open to being deliberately screwed with for destructive purposes.
I remember reading Sam Altman from Open AI complaining that people bing polite cost him so much money by wasting costly precious cycles on its servers…
But was that due to training on such, or merely when parsing unnecessary input to the LLM across so many users?
An excerpt
Is the link to the article missing or am I just not . . .
Oops, it’s fixed now
Missing the link to the article, kind sir.
Link for anyone looking
Thank you! I’ve copied it into the post.
I must have dropped it from the scheduler somehow
i tried watching it recently but it’s too real to be enjoyable anymore. oh for the days when we didn’t think fascism was a credible threat.
